>>13473733>Survives on surface for 20 daysYou mean 5 years. JPL's autism tends to make them overengineer the fuck out of any probe they build. Most missions are designed for extremely conservative timeframes, but tend to exceed them by 1-2 order magnitudes on average.
>OpinionsEither Falcon Heavy or Cargoship will be a delivery vehicle. I could very well see NASA contracting SpaceX for this flight where the probe is paired with a set of 10-20 Starlink satellites and a deep space network relay satellite as well. The Europa Lander is deployed to the surface with an uplink to the overhead Starlink network, which then via laserlinks relays to the deep space network satellite and that sends the signal to Mars where its downloaded into a local buffer (as backup), before being transmitted to Earth. So rather than getting still images and a few megabytes at a time in data bursts, we'll get hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes per burst and with it being relayed through Mars, allow for a larger amount of scientific data that can be collected.
Its all but guaranteed that anywhere from 20-50 humans WILL be on Mars by 2032. Perhaps up to 100. If this is true, then the probability of the data from this probe being relayed directly TO Mars for analysis is more likely than being relayed to Earth directly. Not to mention, the latency difference between Mars and Europa is far lesser than the latency difference between mission control Earth and Europa.
>Distance from Earth to Europa is 630,400,000km>light speed = 300,000km/s>radio transmission time therefore is: 35 minutes one way>Distnace from Mars to Europa is 549,786,000km>radio transmission time is thereofre: 30 minutes5 minutes isn't a all that much time technically, but across astronomical scales, 5 minutes is a really long ass time. You could argue that the amount of science you can do with that extra 5 minutes is massive. We're probably talking several months of cumulative time over a 5 year mission profile more
